Out of Borneo

My eyes closed, I feel the plane lift off the runway on my final journey out of Borneo and I replay in my mind the whisper I believed to have heard coming from the jungle while I reluctantly cleared away the last traces of what had been the open-air studio where I had painted for so many years:

- When you’re gone, we’ll be back…

I ease back into my seat and gaze out of the window as the plane tips to the left revealing the crystal clear sea below - overlapping shades of green and blue I had never seen from the shore littered with an array of metal structures and super-tankers - and I take in one last look of the fabled rigs that make the Sultan of Brunei one of the richest men in the world. These are the fields that sustain one of the most paradoxical countries on Earth, the Sultanate of Brunei.

For four years I lived and worked on the far-away island of Borneo where, as an artist I tended, almost religiously, to tapping in to a new raw source of inspiration and channelling it into my own work. But gradually, unnoticeably, I found myself absorbed in the building of bridges with the reclusive local artists and organizing projects together in spite of the difficulties the abyss of cultural differences brought about by September 11 placed between us. This, in a way, is the story of how Art – cultural exchange - can make a difference and affect people and things in a way, and with a reach, politics seldom does.

Writing the tale is in itself an adventure, one, I hope, you will wish to accompany me on even if I admit in my opening sentences that as I put pen to paper I don’t quite know where I want to go or where we both will end. Borneo, like so many wondrous places Man has desecrated on his quest for supremacy, has become an ambiguous place – it is and it isn’t what we dream it to be. Whatever the reason you picked this up – be it Borneo or the paintings and images you leafed through inquisitively at the bookshop - I am hoping to take you beyond those images and any preconceived ideas you still may have of the place, at the risk of shattering its mystique and loosing you along the way.